The 2015 MidSOUTH Summer Conference for Integrated Behavioral Health Studies (MSSC) will be held from Wednesday through Friday, June 10 to 12, on the UALR campus.

The conference is bringing a full slate of workshops, speakers, and panelists experienced in dealing in trauma-informed care and integrated mental health care for those individuals faced with many challenges in their lives.

The conference is in its 43rd year and its 21st at UALR, during which time there have been many changes in the fields of substance abuse, mental health, and child welfare.

MidSOUTH, the training center for the UALR School of Social Work, is co-sponsoring the annual event with help from the Division of Behavioral Health Services of the Arkansas Department of Human Services.

For more information, contact Program Manager Charlotte Besch at the MidSOUTH Center for Prevention and Training at UALR, at 501.569.8459.

More about the conference speakers

Tonier Cain used to live a life of hustling the streets of Annapolis, Md. Known as “Neen” at the time, in just 15 years, she had been arrested 83 times with 66 convictions. Neen had–and lost–four children, she was a crack addict, a prostitute, and desperately lost. Today she receives requests to serve as the keynote speaker for the United Nations, government agencies, teachers, community and civic organizations, mental health agencies, substance abuse programs, corrections facilities and trauma survivors. She has been featured in the documentary, “Behind Closed Doors: Trauma Survivors and the Psychiatric System,” and is the subject of the award-winning film, “Healing Neen.” After surviving a childhood of unspeakable sexual abuse, unrelenting violence, and betrayal by systems that were charged with helping, Cain stands before her audiences today, a testimony to the resiliency of the human spirit exemplifying the innate human instinct to survive.

Christy Matta, author of “The Stress Response: How Dialectical Behavior Therapy Can Free You from Needless Anxiety, Worry, Anger, and Other Symptoms of Stress,” is trained intensively in Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Matta also has extensive training in Mindfulness. She has provided clinical supervision to DBT residential programs and was a member of the senior administrative team that designed Grove Street Adolescent Residential Program, a winner of the American Psychiatric Association’s Gold Award.

Dr. Steven Schroeder is the distinguished professor of health and health care for the Department of Medicine, University of California at San Francisco, where he also heads the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center. The center, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the American Legacy Foundation, works with leaders of more than 80 American health professional organizations and healthcare institutions to increase the cessation rate for smokers. Between 1990 and 2002, he was president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. During that time the foundation made grant expenditures of almost $4 billion in pursuit of its mission of improving the health and health care of all Americans. The foundation developed new programs in substance abuse prevention and treatment, care at the end of life, and health insurance expansion for children, among others.

Kendra Johnson, state director of HRC Arkansas, leads the organization’s Project One America effort across the state to bring equality to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Johnson received an undergraduate degree from Spelman College and a graduate degree from UALR, where her capstone project was “HIV/AIDS Prevention Programs in Arkansas: A Needs Assessment.” She most recently worked at Better Community Development as Lead In-Person Assister. Johnson has worked with Southerners on New Ground and also served as the interim executive director of the Women’s Project in Little Rock. Panel members will consist of individuals working with LBGTQ youth; with the issue of homelessness; with cultural aspects in the community dealing with race, ethnicity and faith; with health disparity issues, and with the issues of suicide and violence.